“IRD also
encouraged book production described in Whitehall
as “cross fertilisation.” Robert
Conquest, the scholar and author, who has been frequently critical of the Soviet Union, was one of those who worked for IRD. He was
in the FO until 1956.

After he left,
he says, IRD suggested to him that he could combine some of the data he had
gathered from Soviet publications into a book. He sold Bodley Head a ready-made
series of eight called “Soviet studies.” Bodley Head says it published as a
normal commercial arrangement selling 1,500 copies, a third of the total to a US
publisher Fred Praeger. Praeger, who had published a number of books previously
at the request of the CIA, also says this was a normal commercial arrangement.”
–The Guardian Friday January 27 1978.